


wondrous

by shoestringheart



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Stucky - Freeform, The TFIOS AU nobody asked for, bucky is a grouchy asshole, steve is a grouchy asshole, they both have cancer and it's gr9
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:58:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8970934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoestringheart/pseuds/shoestringheart
Summary: “You can’t just sit here and die.” The statement is made in exasperation; a side effect of dealing with him, he was sure, of sitting here and watching him die.Steve has cancer. It sucks. It sucks a little less when he meets Bucky Barnes, who also has cancer.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the TFIOS AU that nobody asked for. featuring skinny steve rogers with cancer.
> 
> The title is from a poem by Sarah Freligh.

“You can’t just sit here and _die_.” The statement is made in exasperation; a side effect of dealing with him, he was sure, of sitting here and watching him die.

“Don’t really have the energy for much else, Peg. Sorry.” Only he’s not really sorry (or at least not really sorry about not having the energy to do more than _sit here and die_ ) and Peggy knows it. Probably.

Peggy mutters something about _Dr. Erskine hearing about this_ before she walks off, no doubt to fetch his latest round of medication which he, coincidentally, didn’t have the energy for, either. He doubted Peggy would be so willing to let that one slide, though.

He’s right—Peggy lines his pills up like little soldiers and he swallows them, painfully, one by one. With applesauce. It was yogurt, and then pudding, but they switched to applesauce because dairy started doing Weird and Bad things to Steve’s digestive tract. Weird and Bad things like explosive diarrhea which, actually, doesn’t get any less embarrassing after the fifth time you’ve shit your pants.

There are a lot of things that happen now that, two years ago, would have mortified Steve. Look, he’s always been a sick kid. That was just the way his life went. But it was just severe asthma that complicated itself a million times over until one day it _wasn’t_. One of the fancy pants treatments they tried planted cancer in his lung tissue and by the time they found it…

So, now, here he was: twenty-three and dying of lung cancer, which was, like, the shittiest of the shitty lots in life. But it wasn’t like Steve minded the whole “dying young” thing—rather, he minded the whole “it’s taking forever to die” thing. Because two years ago, Dr. Erskine had said things like “six months max” but then Steve had lived seven, and then eight, and then eighteen months past his projected date of death.

 _Each extra day is a gift_ , Peggy had said in the beginning. Steve got so tired of hearing her say it, he finally asked her to stop and now she didn’t say it anymore, but Steve could tell she was thinking it. Since Steve had now lived eighteen months past his projected date of death, Peggy seemed to think that the _dying young_ part of his life had been put on hold. Steve wasn’t entirely inclined to agree with her, but he didn’t really have the _energy_ to argue about it. So what, he dies at 24 instead of 21. Big deal. It wasn’t like he was making the most of his bonus years--He was just stuck in purgatory, he figured. Stuck between a longer-than-months life expectancy and dying young which, for Steve, was kind of like “rock and a hard place.”

“You need to eat some lunch.” Back to that argument then. Steve sighs and shifts in the arm chair he sits in when Peggy starts grousing at him for being in bed.

“Not hungry.”

“Tough shit.” Peggy sounds angry. One of those days, then.

“You gotta pick, Peg. Nothing sounds like it wants to stay down."

“You don’t eat, I’m hauling your ass to Urgent Care or ER!” she yells behind her as she disappears into the kitchen again to fix him something to eat. By the sound of it, soup. Always soup when Steve won’t pick.

Peggy stays with him most of the time now. His mother stays with him when she doesn’t, or he stays with her, and sometimes he stays with Sam or vice versa, but ever since Dr. Erskine said _depressed_ and slid a prescription for an antidepressant across the exam table, Steve hasn’t been allowed to be alone, just in case he decided to, like, speed up the whole _dying young_ thing.

He doesn’t have the energy to kill himself, but that wasn’t really a compelling argument as far as his mother, Peggy, and Sam were concerned, so now he had 24/7 companionship.

“So after lunch I thought we could go to the park,” Peggy says, setting a tray set with soup, some red Gatorade and a banana smoothie down in front of him.

“Don’t really feel like walking.”

“We could take the wheelchair,” Peggy continues as though she hadn’t heard him, sitting across from him in the other armchair and looking out the window. “Some fresh air might be good for you.”

Steve kicks the oxygen concentrator, for the past four years,  was his ever-faithful companion. “Got plenty of air.”

Peggy fixes him with a stern gaze. “You’re going to support group today,” she says, in a voice that booked no arguments.

That was the other part of Dr. Erskine prescribing an antidepressant and his mother, Peggy, and Sam deciding he couldn’t be alone ever. Dr. Erskine had insisted on Steve attending a support group for Young Adults with Cancer. The weekly meetings were not Steve’s idea of a good time, plain and simple, and for the four months that he’d been going to the meetings, he’d only gotten out of them when he was hospitalized. It didn’t stop him from trying.

“If I’m expected to go to support group today, I want to take a nap first,” Steve says. “Not go to the park.”

“Eat your soup,” Peggy replies.

&

Steve wins the argument about napping versus going to the park, but that meant that he had to attend support group with minimal fussing, which Peggy gladly sacrifices _fresh air_ for.

He does his best _I’m miserable_ face when Peggy wakes him up to get ready, but it’s lost on Peggy, who has seen every variety of his _I’m miserable_ face and knows when he’s miserable because he feels shittier than usual and when he’s miserable because he’s Depressed.

“When was the last time you put deodorant on?” she asks him.

“I don’t have the energy for deodorant,” he replies and Peggy rolls her eyes, fetching it out of the bathroom.

“We’re doing a shower when you get back,” she says, tugging the dirty t-shirt off and tossing it on the laundry hamper. “Or first thing in the morning if you’re too tired then.”

She brushes her fingers over the Hickman catheter, dark and scary against his thin chest, and Steve sighs. “Sharon’s coming over for a dressing change tomorrow, right?”

“Right,” Peggy says quietly. “So I guess we can wait.” She touches his port again and looks Sad, which Steve hates.

He’s known Peggy since they were kids; she’s his best friend, and as such, she puts up with way more than any best friend should have to. She’s also seen more of him than any best friend should have to, so Steve doesn’t protest when she helps him tug on the clean shirt and shoves his shriveled dick into a fresh pair of boxers and helps him into the clean sweatpants. He only sighs a very little bit when she combs his thinning hair and helps him tug a baseball cap on. The Yankees. His favorite. He’d been eighteen when he was diagnosed, so he was outside of the Make a Wish age range, but his mother had paid for season tickets anyway.

Peggy chats all the way through getting him dressed like it’s a normal thing, a twenty-three year old girl dressing her twenty-three year old best friend, and Steve supposes that, to them, it is a normal thing. He thinks of the framed poster in the cancer ward that says “Make a new normal.” He wonders if the author had this in mind when they wrote it.

Probably not; the people who wrote things like that usually thought of cancer patients in beanies, lip-synching in a YouTube video to “I’m a Survivor.”

“Thanks, Peg.”

“You’re welcome, Steve.” She offers him a smile and pecks him on the cheek.

They’d tried dating, once, five years ago, when Steve had been at his peak health (which was, admittedly, not that… peaky), and it had just been like dating his sister. Besides, Peggy was now dating Angie and was pretty happy about it. Happy enough that she’d taken to matchmaking for Steve, aided and abetted by the one person Steve could actually stomach socializing with at the support group—Natasha.

“Want to take the chair today? I won’t tell.”

A part of him does, but also doesn’t. He shrugs as Peggy switches him from the concentrator to the portable oxygen tank.

“We’ll take it, and see how you feel when you get there. Ready?”

&

The really annoying thing about support group, Steve decided about two meetings in, aside from the fact that he was being dragged in against his will, was that it was run by a guy named Nick who didn’t want to be there (and pretty clearly didn’t want to be there), and that most of the people who attended Support Group fell into two main categories: Survivors who wanted to talk about how hashtag blessed they were, or people like Steve, who were coming to support group because their doctors said they had to, and whose caregivers dragged them in.

It makes for a pretty grim group, anyway, and Steve usually spends the time watching the clock and thinking about how the whole thing kind of makes him _more_ suicidal than he already (supposedly) is. There’s one thing that makes support group bearable, and that is his friend Natasha. Steve doesn’t really have friends—aside from Peggy and Sam and his Mom—but he does have Natasha and while she may not be the friendliest person he’s ever met, she seems to like him okay, and she spends the whole time making under-her-breath comments about Nick and his eyepatch, which is something Steve can get behind.

Four months into support group, Steve finally greets Natasha when he comes in instead of just awkwardly sitting down next to her, so that’s a bonus. He guesses.

He manages to shake Peggy at the door after insisting he _doesn’t_ need the wheelchair, and Peggy goes off to buy more food he’s not going to eat while he’s at group.

So usually he’ll come in, and say hi to Natasha, and then sit down while Nick rattles his way through a profanity-laced introduction. He’ll open the stage up for anyone who wants to share. Someone, undoubtedly, will, talking about remission or about treatments or about shaving their head, and then Nick will open the mic up for anyone new and then he’ll rattle his way through a profanity laced conclusion and then they’ll be done for another week. Natasha will ask him if he wants a cookie; he’ll say no, and she’ll shrug like, suit yourself, and then they’ll stand on the curb and make small talk until Peggy rolls up.

That’s how it usually goes.

This time, though, when Steve makes his way down to the room the support group is held in, Natasha is already deep in a conversation with someone Steve’s never seen before; a guy with dark hair and dark eyes, mouth twitched up in half a grin as he listens to whatever Natasha’s saying and then laughs, before responding in kind.

Steve freezes in the doorway, stopping so quickly that Clint trips over his portable oxygen container and curses. It makes quite the clatter and Natasha and the guy look up. Natasha grins and waves him over, and Steve sighs and schlepps over.

“Steve, good to see you’ve extended your eighteen extra months another week.”

“Natasha.”

“This is Bucky.” She leans back so that—Bucky can reach across to shake Steve’s hand. “He’s a Survivor, too. Bucky, this is Steve.”

Bucky looks like he wants to say something, but Nick smacks the podium.

“Alright, fuckers,” he says, and the meeting is in order.

They go around the circle and introduce themselves and Steve discovers that Bucky had carcinoma, but has been in remission for three months. Not before the sarcoma took his entire left arm, all the way up into the shoulder, and everyone murmurs their condolences for Bucky’s missing limb. Bucky waves them off.

“It was my life or my arm, you know?” he says and Steve dismisses Bucky as one of those incurable optimists. Bucky and Peggy would get along beautifully, he decides, and also decides that they’ll never meet, not in a million years.

Nick dismisses them with a “Okay, fuckers, next time,” and Natasha turns to him.

“I want froyo. You want froyo?”

“No,” Steve says, and Natasha beams.

“Great. I’ll text Peggy and tell her I’m taking you home. Come on.”

Natasha goes ahead, getting caught up in a conversation with Clint, leaving Steve and Bucky alone in the hard plastic chairs, awkwardly half-facing each other.

“Hey,” Steve says, because he doesn’t know what _else_ to say.

“Hey,” Bucky says, and grins, a grin that takes up basically his whole face. It’s too big to be strictly attractive—too wide and toothy for anyone to call it a “nice” smile, and it’s a little lopsided. Not that Steve can do much better, but. Whatever. Bucky’s got the kind of smile you see on Relay for Life pamphlets—wide and bright and _hopeful_.

“The nurses must’ve loved you,” Steve says, and then blushes. He hadn’t meant to say that, but Bucky laughs, shrugging his right shoulder.

“I dunno, I guess. Why do you say that?”

“You got a nice smile,” Steve says, and blushes again. “I just mean, like—you look like someone on a Relay for Life poster.” Christ. “Sorry. Lack of oxygen?”

Bucky laughs again and nudges Steve’s oxygen tank with his toe. “Lung cancer, huh? Little young for that, aren’t you? Start smoking when you were, like, seven?”

“Three, actually,” Steve says, and Bucky laughs a third time, surprised. “No, actually, much less exciting. I was asthmatic and they tried this _revolutionary_ treatment, which really helped the asthma until it started growing cancer.”

“Yikes,” Bucky says, and shakes his head. “You still in treatment?”

“No,” Steve says. He pauses. He doesn’t want to share this part with Bucky, for some reason, wants to say _yes, he’s in remission_ , or _yes, he’s in treatment and the prognosis is great_ , but he takes a deep breath and sighs. “No, I—I was supposed to die eighteen months ago.”

Most people got awkward and quiet after that bombshell, which was usually preferable to Steve—for some reason, he doesn’t want Bucky to get awkward and quiet—to Steve’s surprise, he nods.

“So you’re a miracle, then.” He’s grinning, and Steve can hear the sarcasm in his voice.

Not that he’s wrong—by all rights, Steve is a miracle. He’s lived three times as long as he was supposed to.

“In the flesh,” he deadpans and Bucky laughs a fourth time.

“Steve! Bucky! Froyo! Let’s go!”

Bucky waves Natasha off and looks at Steve. “Alright, miracle boy. Time for Froyo.”

Steve grins. His cheeks ache.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on TUMBLR at shoestringheartfic ! I take requests!


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